OPAL a Versatile Tool for Charged Particle Accelerator Simulations

Abstract

Many sophisticated computer models have been developed to understand the behaviour of particle accelerators. Even these complex models often do not describe the measured data. Interactions of the beam with external fields, other particles in the same beam and the beam walls all present modelling challenges. These can be challenging to model correctly even with modern supercomputers. This paper describes OPAL (Object Oriented Parallel Accelerator Library), a parallel open source tool for charged-particle optics in linear accelerators and rings, including 3D space charge. OPAL is built from the ground up as a parallel application exemplifying the fact that high performance computing is the third leg of science, complementing theory and experiment. Using the MAD language with extensions, OPAL can run on a laptop as well as on the largest high performance computing systems. The OPAL framework makes it easy to add new features in the form of new C++ classes, enabling the modelling of many physics processes and field types. OPAL comes in two flavours: OPAL-cycl: tracks particles with 3D space charge including neighbouring turns in cyclotrons and FFAs with time as the independent variable. OPAL-t: models beam lines, linacs, rf-photo injectors and complete XFELs excluding the undulator. The code is managed through the git distributed version control system. A suite of unit tests have been developed for various parts of OPAL, validating each part of the code independently. System tests validate the overall integration of different elements.

to be submitted to Phys Rev AB

References in corpus (13)

• CODATA Recommended Values of the Fundamental Physical Constants: 2010
• Beam Dynamics in High Intensity Cyclotrons Including Neighboring Bunch Effects: Model, Implementation and Application
• Towards Quantitative Simulations of High Power Proton Cyclotrons
• Transverse-Longitudinal Coupling by Space Charge in Cyclotrons
• Beam Dynamics Simulation for the High Intensity DAEδALUS Cyclotrons
• A Fast Parallel Poisson Solver on Irregular Domains Applied to Beam Dynamic Simulations
• Cost-effective Design Options for IsoDAR
• Whitepaper on the DAEdALUS Program
• On the accuracy of Monte Carlo based beam dynamics models for the degrader in proton therapy facilities
• On Architecture and Performance of Adaptive Mesh Refinement in an Electrostatics Particle-In-Cell Code
• The Dynamical Kernel Scheduler - Part 1
• A Parallel General Purpose Multi-Objective Optimization Framework, with Application to Beam Dynamics
• Design and Simulation of the IsoDAR RFQ Direct Injection System and Spiral Inflector

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Order-of-Magnitude Beam Current Improvement in Compact Cyclotrons
• On Architecture and Performance of Adaptive Mesh Refinement in an Electrostatics Particle-In-Cell Code
• Global Sensitivity Analysis on Numerical Solver Parameters of Particle-In-Cell Models in Particle Accelerator Systems
• Eliminating uncertainty of thermal emittance measurement in solenoid scans due to rf and solenoid fields overlap
• Experimental demonstration of cascaded round-to-flat and flat-to-round beam transformations
• A Massively Parallel Performance Portable Free-space Spectral Poisson Solver